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 18LETTERS FROM ABROAD

become so difficult nowadays that I had to give it up. Specially, going from France to Germany is beset with obstacles. On my way back from Holland I shall try my best at least to visit Hamburg. Germany needs sympathy, and I hope I shall have the opportunity to go there and offer it to her.

The other day I was taken to Rheims and other devastated regions of France in a motor car. It was a most saddening sight. Some of the terrible damages deliberately done, not for any necessities of war, but to cripple France for ever, were so savage that their memory can never be effaced. For it will take a tremendous effort and also an immense lapse of time to make them things of the past. When the spiritual ideal is lost, when the human relationship is completely broken up, then individuals freed from that creative bond of wholeness find a fearful joy in destructiveness. In such catastrophes one can realise what a stupendous force of annihilation is not only kept in check in our society, but made into multitudinous manifestations of beauty and fruitfulness. Then we know that evils are like meteors, stray fragments, wreckage of a broken-up wholeness, which need the attraction of a great planet of life’s ideal to be assimilated into the peace of creation. Only spiritual ideals have that great power of attraction that can transmute these rebellious fractions into a perfect roundness. The evil forces are literally outlaws. They only need